


Not That Kind of Love

by Starsofgallifrey



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Court of Owls, Gotham, Gunshot, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Love, M/M, Realization, Romance, after 3x14, evil isabella
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 20:25:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9624065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starsofgallifrey/pseuds/Starsofgallifrey
Summary: Isabella reveals herself as who she truly is, and Edward seeks out Oswald to reconcile.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flygurl2sam](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=flygurl2sam).



The ropes were fastened tight around his wrists. Where was he? The last thing he could remember was writing and planning out a future scheme to bring down the GCPD into pathetic shambles. Just the thought of it again was enough to make Ed smile. Though, in his current predicament he knew he shouldn’t be smiling. He was in some sort of warehouse, similar to the one he had brought Oswald to a couple of months ago. Memories of the burning barrels and Oswald’s tearful love confession on the shattered car belonging to the woman he had loved flooded in and he flexed his fingers, trying not to fathom the fact that Oswald was in fact, dead; by his hand, no less. _Stop thinking about him_.

There were no burning barrels here. There wasn’t a smashed car. It was just him, tied to a chair, staring at muddy water seeping into the cement beneath his rather expensive green shoes, and the windows in the far back that only seemed to allow a sliver of light in at a time. There was a quiet clicking of sharp heels from behind him, followed by a couple other pairs of feet with not so much prestige. Ed yawned, in earnest. He hadn’t gotten the best amount of sleep in the past few weeks, and he was unsure he kept waking up from mortifying nightmares he couldn’t remember. Perhaps the sleep he had gotten in this rundown wooden chair had been the most he had gotten in a week entirely. He tugged at his restraints for a second and suddenly heard a woman’s voice. “Untie him.”

Two men were suddenly surround him, picking at the scratchy rope digging into his wrists. Some sort of henchmen. The woman who had spoken wore a black dress fitting her figure perfectly… _oh_. For a moment Ed didn’t want to jump for joy or cry out in relief. For a moment there was a screaming voice inside his head like a warning, but it dissipated into nothing but an overwhelming sense of desire.  Edward tipped forward, not quite out of his restraints yet. “Kr-Isabella!” He cried out in disbelief.  She stared down at him with an unreadable expression on her face. It didn’t register in his mind that this wasn’t a good sign for them. “Isabella you’re alive! You’re alive! You’re alive!” He chanted feverously, and the instant the men who had arrived with her undid the restraints on his legs, he hopped forward, gripping her into a firm embrace. “Alive” he repeated. _This wasn’t right._ “How?”

She smiled up at him blankly, her eyes portraying nothing. Ed wasn’t processing her eremitic attitude towards him at all. It was everything he had dreamed of. _That isn’t true. There had only been nightmares._ “I thought about you every second of every day after you… after I thought…”

“Game’s over Ed,” Isabella said sweetly. Her voice was angelic and everything he had yearned to hear. He had even zoned out on what she had said just to replay the sound of her voice in his head.

“Hm?” He questioned. This is when he realized she had been holding her hands behind her back the whole time, a gun gripped in her right arm. She pulled it out with ease, pointing it against Ed’s forehead until he began to instinctively back up. This had to be a joke, Isabella loved a good game just like him. He laughed, teeth baring playfully. She shot both the men she had brought into the warehouse without a second thought. With bullet wounds bleeding out profusely from their foreheads, they both collapsed to the ground at Ed’s feet. He felt a heavy gasp escape his lips.

It wasn’t the death of lowlife mobsters that shocked him, but the fact that Isabella had it in her to kill. Perhaps it was a love confession in the sense that she wanted to start killing people with him. “I’ll teach you where to shoot someone that it’ll really hurt,” he said with a warm smile.

“Like where you shot him?” Isabella asks with a glossed over gaze. The walls around Ed’s thoughts were starting to crack and chip away. He was starting to understand that this situation was exactly what it looked like.

“Who?” he lied, knowing full well who she was talking about. She avoided his question.

“Edward I’m going to say this quickly and clearly, so if you decide you actually want to accept the situation you’re in, I’d suggest you listen.” Her red lips moved at a deliciously fast pace. Ed flinched, unable to process her words. It was going it one ear and right out the other. He didn’t _understand_. She had to be setting up some kind of mind blowing riddle. Edward would prepare his brain for such a puzzle. He grinned as she continued to speak.

“I am from the Court of Owls. We run Gotham and the people who think they run Gotham. My name isn’t Isabella. And I purposefully resemble Kristen Kringle so I could get through to you. Originally it was a different plan…” she trailed off and started to slowly circle him, her black heels tapping every few seconds for an unconscious dramatic effect. “But as soon as the Court figured out poor dear Mayor Cobblepot was in love with his Chief of Staff, we changed the plan so that the ex-killer, ex-mafia, lunatic would want me dead. Be so jealous he’d kill me. And he did. The plan worked out perfectly, and you figured out soon enough your dear friend had betrayed you.” She chuckled, licking her lips. “You oblivious fool.”

The walls in Edward’s mind were crashing down and he was losing the flare of desire in his chest he had felt minutes ago. “Isabella…”

“ _Not_ Isabella,” she snapped.

Ed stood, with his hands helplessly resting against his sides. His lips were parted in an attempt to speak, but he couldn’t find the words. Her story hadn’t hit him in full, not yet. Isabella, she was the love of his life. His heart. His stableness. She stared at him waiting for a response and he felt himself silently choking on words and phrases. He didn’t understand the joke she was pulling; he didn’t get the hidden message. He whispered simply, “I don’t understand this riddle.”

“You’ll understand this,” Isabella said with a grin. Not vengeful or spiteful, just a smile that told him this was just a job to her. In one swift move she lifted the gun and fired into his chest. Searing hot pain ripped throughout his sternum and he clutched his chest frantically trying to stop the sudden bleeding. As he fell to his knees, he felt the last of the walls he had built in his mind crumble into debris.

As blood spilled over his fingers, he remembered the look Oswald had given him when he had shot him at the docks. There had been more pain in his eyes than in the wound itself. Ed’s mind quickly became riddled with guilt. _Oh my god_.

He looked up at Isabella, or whoever she was, mortified. Time seemed to slow down for him. Every single thing hit him at once. All the realizations. All the answers. All the fuck ups he had made. A week he had known her. A week. Oswald had been right. It wasn’t true love what he felt for Isabella, how could it have been. If she hadn’t looked identical to Kristen, he wouldn’t have batted an eye at her. He would have grabbed that wine and bolted to go to that dinner with Oswald…12 hours he had made him wait. Oh god.

He felt light headed, as he gripped to his chest further. “Oswald,” he groaned, his other hand gripping at the damp cement beneath him for purchase.

Isabella hummed happily. “Yep. We knew you would kill him, but it was a bonus you decided to burn down his empire in the process. But you see we didn’t want him dead per say; you made it difficult for us to resuscitate him, but we managed. Anyhow, the court hadn’t expected you to rise to power so rapidly. We had to cut that reign short I’m afraid.”

Ed stared up at her with wide brown eyes. He couldn’t recognize her. Every feeling he thought he had felt for her was nowhere to be found. She didn’t even look like Kristen to him anymore, with her quirked brows, bleached hair, and pointed red nails.

The pain was spreading to more than just his chest and he keeled forward in pain, letting out small gasps. Isabella reached down to grab his face in one harsh move. Her nails dug painfully into his jaw. “I offered to be the one to kill you. I thought it would be poetic.”

With his last remaining strength, he pulls away from her grasp, pretty sure she had managed to draw blood in the process. She laughed. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I was very much into a good tragedy.”

Ed felt the life draining from his body very quickly, and he gave into his body’s desire to collapse entirely, face smooshed into the cement. He could feel blood pooling at his stomach. Isabella cracked her knuckles, still holding the gun tightly in her hand. The words she had been saying were running through his head like the subtitles of a film. His mind was attempting to connect one more puzzle piece with another before he conked out entirely. Then it hit him.

“You made it difficult for us to resuscitate him…” he was echoing her words from moments before, “but we _managed_.”

Isabella smiled from afar. She had been on her way out it seemed. “Yes,” she says firmly. “Oswald Cobblepot is alive.”

_Oswald Cobblepot is alive._

Edward surges up, the searing pain be damned, his impending _death_ be damned. He tackles the surprised _Isabella_ and punches her over and over again. He punches her until her face becomes discolored with blood and distorted. She is screaming, and obviously inexperienced with physical combat. She had dropped the gun in her surprise and Ed reaches with a long arm to grab it and shoots her in her Kristen-Kringle face. She didn’t deserve to wear it.

He collapses again, beside the corpse of his ex-girlfriend. The _second_ corpse of his ex-girlfriend. Oswald was alive. That had been enough for him to get up off his ass and fight back. He wasn’t going to be able to apologize to him if he didn’t save himself. He reached into his pants, and his boxers and searched for his…phone. He dragged it out, smiling at the strategy Oswald had taught him half a year ago. _When you get kidnapped or searched for weapons, the person looking will almost never stick their hands in your undergarments, Ed._ Ed giggles despite his situation, as he types on the keypad with a shaky hand. He was calling one of his lackeys to come pick him up, and told him to bring first aid. He would be saved, Isabella, or the court woman really had a bad shot.

Ed was unsure about what he was feeling. Oswald must still think he had killed Isabella, so he had _still_ killed in jealousy for Ed’s love. But Ed…as much as he hated admitting this the most.  He had been an idiot. He had been oblivious, and saw love where it didn’t exist. From the moment he had shot Oswald he had regretted it. When he threw him in the water and watched him sink into its dark depths he had felt his heart fall out of his chest with him. He passed it off as nothing at the time. It haunted him every night though. Every night he would wake up from a nightmare, and that same damn feeling was like a rapture in his chest.

He would find Oswald Cobblepot. If he be in Gotham, or if he be in another country. In another world.

 

~

 

When word had gotten out that Edward Nygma had discovered his survival, Oswald knew he would come after him, and sure enough, he heard from Gabe and his connections that Edward was doing just that. Searching for him. Probably with a bazooka like Oswald had used on Galavan, just to make sure he stayed dead this time.

Oswald had vowed to forget Edward Nygma, ever since he had been revived by those kindly and coincidentally witness fishermen that had saved him. It had been a hard task, but if he wanted to build his empire up again he needed to let go of love, of loss.

He was held up in a cabin just on the outskirts of Gotham city, resting in a cabin so delicately provided by a girl named Ivy. She had agreed to help him for whatever reason. He still felt she had an ulterior motive for dealing with him, but at the moment it wasn’t something he wanted to waste time on investigating.

Oswald looked at the clock. Two weeks Edward Nygma had been supposedly searching for him. “Come on, Eddie. You’re smarter than this,” he muttered to himself, taking a sip of tea. Knowing he should be up, preparing for the worst, he was sat by the fireplace staring out the window at the snow amongst the dead trees. Half his time here he considered staying, perhaps the rest of his life. Everyone would mourn the Penguin while Oswald Cobblepot stayed sheltered, reading a book, drinking tea.

But of course he couldn’t do that. Stability like this only lasted for a while when you were someone like him. Someone like…there was a knock at the door. Oswald’s heart skipped. Gabe and his men were away, and Ivy was…god knows where Ivy was.

He gripped his cup in his hand, and the door slowly opened without an invitation. Edward. Suddenly after so many days of attempting to forget this man, trying to give up love, it all came pouring back, and warm desire crept into his cheeks. _Damn bastard_.

“Oswald,” Edward said in disbelief, or disgust. Oswald couldn’t tell. The penguin stood himself up, no longer feeling pain from the region in his chest. He hoped he looked presentable for his next death. He only had baggy jeans and was wearing a black button up shirt.

“Do it, Ed.” He said simply. So much for regaining his power and returning to Gotham. He hadn’t expected Edward to find him so quickly.

Edward’s expression was something he hadn’t expected. Even knowing he would be killed, he couldn’t help but admire how damn stunning this man looked in such a thick green colored suit. His hair resembled what it used to be, when they had met. It was curly again, seemingly not having been brushed in days. Was he really so ruthless to find Oswald he would give up on grooming himself? It didn’t sound like Ed.

Ed ran to him then, and for a moment Oswald thought that maybe he would strange him to death, or knock him out to bring him somewhere for torture, but Edward pulled him in for the most intense hug he had ever received in his life. Edward’s entire lean frame was pressed up again him, large hands rolling up and down his back. He could feel Ed’s nose in his hair, feel his lips on his scalp. Oswald was suddenly shaking with sensory overload, blushing from head to toe.

_Unexpected._

“I don’t know what I feel for you, but I need you,” Ed whispers, still holding onto him like he is Ed’s lifeline. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

Oswald doesn’t realize he’s crying until his own tears drop to Ed’s shoulder. Ed pulls back to look at him, and their noses are practically touching. Oswald tries to breathe but he can’t catch his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Ed asked. Oswald couldn’t answer. “Did I hurt you?”

“You shot me you idiot,” Oswald cracks a small smile but there are still tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Sorry about that,” Ed says softly.

“You’re apologizing?” Oswald asked, his hands still being held by Ed like he was proposing. It was leaving the ex-mobster light-headed. Ed was still just as gorgeous as when he had last seen him.

“Apologizing and admitting I was wrong,” Ed says and Oswald understands how hard it is for him to admit that; Ed strokes a tear away. “I was wrong.”

Without warning Oswald grabs him by his dark green tie and drags him down, not thinking about it. He crashes his lips against Ed’s. Sure it was all going too fast, but Oswald wasn’t going to miss this moment. It was everything he had ever imagined it would be. Ed’s lips were so soft and sweet tasting. Out of all the places he thought he’d be today, it wasn’t here, making out with the man who had tried to kill him only months back. Right now it didn’t matter to him.  They could discuss that trite shit later. Now it was the moment, and it was Oswald not missing this chance to show Ed just how much he loved him. Edward stood against him in subtle shock, not moving a muscle, not moving his lips. Oswald thought he would be the only one standing here, that this wouldn’t make Edward think about what they could be. But as Oswald was about to pull away he felt a strong hand curl around the nape of his neck and pull him in closer.


End file.
